20,000 Leagues...Fathom That

     My original title for this post was Believe Just A Bit (Coin), but the truth was that I knew very little --er, make that nothing-- about digital currency (digital currencies differ from crypto currencies such as Bitcoin...what??)  If you're in a similar state, wondering what the difference is between Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, much less Tether and Bit Coin (now recognized as currency in El Salvador), perhaps even China's RMB, then welcome to my corner.  Which is not to say that people aren't diving into accepting this new method of "currency."  One restaurant owner in San Francisco, who used to accept payment in Bitcoin when it was valued at just a few hundred dollars, recently made so much money selling his early Bitcoins that he retired much earlier than planned.  Still not sure how digital and crypto currencies are traded, or taxed, or how many such currencies there might be?  An article in Time noted: According to some estimates, a fifth of the global population will be exposed to a central-bank digital currency within three years. By 2027, some $24 trillion of assets around the world is expected to be in digital form...Physical money isn’t going to completely vanish.  Although just $5 trillion of the $431 trillion of wealth in the world today is in the form of cash in pockets, safes and bank vaults, no central bank is seriously advocating the complete abolition of bills and coins.

     None of this really came as a surprise to me for I could see that my old school thinking that "cash was king" was rapidly fading into the sunset; it's a changed world, evident to me as I puzzle at people paying with their watches or boarding planes with their phones.  But then my parents were probably equally puzzled when they watched our dollars no longer being backed with gold or silver but only by the full "faith and credit" of the U.S. government (I still remember U.S. currency once saying "silver certificates").  The U.S. dollar had suddenly become yet another "fiat" currency.  Here's how Investopedia described it: Fiat currency came about when governments would mint coins out of a valuable physical commodity, such as gold or silver, or print paper money that could be redeemed for a set amount of a physical commodity.  Fiat, however, is inconvertible and cannot be redeemed simply because there is no underlying commodity backing it.  Wait, what?  But then think of writing a check, or tapping a credit card onto a screen, or paying for something online, or having your paycheck deposited electronically, or any of a dozen other ways where you (and a merchant) basically trust that something is there to back your payment.  Your bank says that you have this much money, maybe not physically in your hand but it's there on paper or on your tablet/watch/projection.  The banks and government are happy with this switch to digital currencies because they can store (and sometimes control) your spending data and even "freeze" assets; crypto currencies on the other hand bypass these oversights (no middleman bank or brokerage house or government handling or monitoring the transaction).  Of course crypto currency does come with another cost.

     Crypto currencies (of which there are over 14,000 said Nerd Wallet) are "mined" in the sense that they use tremendous amounts of power and resources to encrypt their access.  Said Forbes: Depending on bitcoin’s cost (a higher price attracts more miners), its global network sucks up between 8 and 15 gigawatts of continuous power, according to Cambridge.  New York City runs on just 6 gigawatts, the nation of Belgium on 10.  Exactly how much carbon is released into the atmosphere by bitcoin mining depends entirely on what energy source is used.  But the pollution is not negligible.  To unlock a single bitcoin, miners must feed their machines about 150,000 kwh, enough juice to power 170 average U.S. homes for a month.  For some holders of cryptocurrency, misplacing or forgetting your password may also mean that your investment is locked out and basically gone...in one instance, that loss totaled nearly $400 million.  So why are so many people still getting into it?  Ask why so many people still "play" the stock market or sit at a blackjack table, or gamble* on an almost bankrupt company such as Game Stop?  YOLO!  But forget me telling you about all that crypto and digital currency which I don't understand (one columnist referred to people such as me as "...just old guys who can't help fighting the glorious last war.")   Forget that I remember days where a handshake or a promise was just that, and where lying about something was frowned upon.  Some changes I am simply unable to fathom.

    That word --fathom-- came up because of a book by Rebecca Giggs which she titled Fathoms.  In the book, which deals with whales, she is speaking of fathoms in a nautical sense since fathoms are still generally used for measuring depth vs. the term "leagues," which was long ago used to measure distance...Jules Verne's sub didn't go quite as deep as you may have thought.  But in her book, depth can have several meanings; said Riggs: We come to whales to be drawn out into the world. and yet the un-peopled sea is also a state of mind -- and inner space.  Our smallness, set against this sublime sea, is connected to the notion that not all the thoughts within us are accessible, that there are thoughts, in some sense, exterior to the self.  Vast feelings that slide, beyond command, beneath the wakeful tending of our days.  The pleasure is that we are mysterious, even to ourselves.  The fabulist ocean, this inscrutable outer space whales return from, in a metaphorical sense, enchants us with our own inward enigmas.  Many throughout history have figured the sea analogous to the human consciousness...The question I am left with is: What will it mean for our inner lives --those of us who cannot disavow the ocean as a psychological motif-- if the twenty-first century sea turns out to be not full of mystery, not inexplicable in its depths, but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human life?  How will we delight in a feeling of unboundedness, in the apparent limitlessness, the unknowable space of our unconscious, if the real ocean demolishes its symbolic history?  An emotional landscape, it turns out, can also begin to acidify.  Something hard to quantify, I suspect, disappears from the palette of human experience, from how we articulate our selfhood to one another, and from our relationship to our own private, inner depths, when we encounter evidence of the ocean's despoliation.

    Whales, it turns out, do far more than simply cast their songs across hundreds of miles and slowly patrol the oceans.  Said a review of her book in The New York Review of Books: As Giggs reports, Australian scientists have concluded that sperm whales --by fertilizing the ocean stream and causing turbulence as they move-- accelerate the growth of plankton, which “absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen on a planetary scale.”  Humpbacks have a similar effect.  In other words, whales have “significantly and quantifiably affected the composition of atmospheric gases worldwide.”  They aren’t merely occupants of this planet.  They are shapers of it too, so much so that when it comes to mitigating climate change, “More whales!” is a reasonable rallying cry.

     While humpback whales may have begun to reappear in Australia, Riggs noted that: Trevor Branch, a marine biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, estimates that numbers of Antarctic blue whales declined by 99.85 percent between 1905 and 1973.  In a single year, more individual animals were hauled and flensed than are left alive in the world today. (emphasis mine)  That alone is difficult to fathom.  In fact, the last time I heard the word "fathom" used in that sense (as in, to understand) was in another NYB review of a book on Stalin's lawyers during the Nuremberg trials:  In November 1943, during a postwar-planning summit in Tehran, Stalin proposed over dinner with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt that somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 German military officers should be executed following Germany’s defeat.  Stalin was known to have a sense of humor, but sometimes it was hard to tell when he was joking.  In principle, but on a vastly reduced scale, Churchill agreed: he had no desire to repeat the post–World War I fiasco of attempting to mount a public trial of defeated war criminals and preferred simply to execute the Nazi political and military leadership and be done with it...Publicizing the USSR’s unfathomable losses during the war --roughly 27 million dead, another 25 million left homeless, 30,000 factories destroyed-- would help justify the huge reparations Stalin intended to exact from a defeated Germany. (again, emphasis mine)

    Life --and death-- at such scales are truly difficult to comprehend.  We humans are, so far at least, very brief visitors here.  As John McPhee put it in his book Basin & Range, if you spread your arms fully outward and consider the tip of your right arm as the beginning of our planet as we know it, then at the edge of your fingernail of your left arm you could, "in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file...eradicate human history."  Bill Bryson may have described it a bit more openly in his earlier book, starting with a journey to the Cambrian period: If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life.  But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period...In fact, we now know that complex organisms existed at least a hundred million years before the Cambrian.  

    If that was a bit difficult to grasp, he reduces the time scale down to a single day: If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earths history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours.  Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes.  Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia.  At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale.  Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land.  Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.  Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great coniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident.  Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour.  At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins.  Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight.  The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifespan barely an instant.  

     Viewed in that manner, what's wrong with believing in something that you can't see or can't hold in your hand?  When you first hear that word of believe or belief, one tends to think either of oneself (this is what I believe) or of others (this is what I feel that "they" believe -- the right/left, the rich/poor, the young/old, the blacks/whites, the Christians/Muslims, the on and on).  In the end it doesn't seem to matter if peoples or religions or countries or neighbors are grouped together.  Believing in something, even believing that we as humans are special, can be as simple or as complicated as a religion that guides your life (or after-life), or a belief that makes you feel justified to carry a gun into a crowd of strangers.  The bottom line is that it all comes down to believing what you want...or does it?  Wear or don't wear masks, justice or injustice, the Almighty dollar.  

    Dan Leach wrote in The Sun that his superpower would be to be invisible, but added: Likely, it's the opposite since.everyone who writes, on some level, craves visibility.  Or maybe it's not the opposite but both.  Maybe I write because I want visibility and invisibility, each on my own terms.  I want you to accept these paragraphs as photographs from my mind, and I want these photographs to tell you something useful about me.  Yet I don't want you to see me.  I want, in the end, for you to have faith that I have something to tell you, something that, when the time is right, will appear to you as a clue.  And if you think I'm expecting the same out of you've guessed correctly...loneliness, more than anything else, (is) the basis for faith: you don't believe because you need to be see; you believe because you want to be known.

     We put down our 18- or 19-year old cat the other day (we had adopted her when she was thought to be 5)...her organs had begun to fail for some reason, her eating shrinking as quickly as her hind quarters.  She always slept next to us by our heads, defending her territory of our bed as viciously as a Bengal tiger; our other cats soon discovered that they would just have to sleep at our feet or not be on our bed at all.  But if you were to press me about my beliefs it would boil down to a simple one, that animals --in fact that all forms of life-- are important, and that if there is an afterlife for us humans then there is one for animals as well (this idea is almost never incorporated in religions or by those who allegedly communicate with those who have passed).  Before our cat died, we told her that nobody would take her spot near our heads, that she would remain the queen of the bed.  To this day, none of our cats have ventured near our pillows; to my way of thinking, that is fairly easy to fathom!

*Addiction can take many forms beyond gambling and alcohol.  An excellent 2018 movie on this subject was the movie, Beautiful Boy with outstanding performances by Steve Carrell and Timothée Chalamet. The film, based on a true story and co-produced by Brad Pitt, details the frustration of a parent trying to understand his son's addiction and surrender to crystal meth, something even the son doesn't understand.  As one doctor tells the father, the rehab and recovery success rate in such cases is less than 5%.  Despite the impactful film and portrayals, the Amazon Studios film netted only $16 million (the film cost $25 million to make).

**Okay, I've talked enough about re-reading (or in this case, listening) to Bill Bryson's 2003 book A Short History of Nearly Everything.  Consider it a sort of science book for the everyday person.  Can't imagine the power of a supervolcano, such as the one that resides beneath Yellowstone National Park?  Here's how Bryson put it: imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you'd have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.  Or trying to imagine the impact of the meteor that struck and began the Cretaceous period?  It struck with the force of 100 million megatons.  Such an outburst is not easily imagined, but as James Lawrence Powell has pointed out, if you exploded one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person alive on earth today you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT impact.  His writing is like that, both astounding to read and easy to grasp.  How's that for learning Science 101?  As a bonus, used copies of the book are often less that $5...